‘I did it for your own good’ is not what you want to hear when the dating site you use sets you up on a bad date. On purpose. ‘Everybody does it’ is similarly disconcerting. But that’s exactly what OkCupid is saying about experiments involving its users.

The free dating and social networking website announced, “We
experiment on human beings!” in a blog post on Monday.

“OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does
any other website. It’s not like people have been building these
things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or
something,” the website’s co-founder Christian Rudder
wrote. “Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be
better. Experiments are how you sort all this out.”

Rudder pointed to the recent uproar when researchers let slip
that Facebook
conducted a psychological experiment on 689,003 randomly
selected English-speaking users by manipulating their emotions
without their knowledge. The company issued an apology for
accessing the content of the human lab rats’ pages, but the
social media network’s second-in-command said she has no
regrets.

“But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re
the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on
every site. That’s how websites work,” the OkCupid
co-founder wrote.

The free love-matching site features member-created quizzes and
multiple-choice questions, and supports multiple modes of
communication, like instant messages and emails. The company
touts its matching algorithm as the best because “We use math
to get you dates. It’s extremely accurate, as long as (a) you’re
honest, and (b) you know what you want.”

Users are also able to rate each other. Those who receive high
ratings may be notified by email that they are in the "top
half of OkCupid's most attractive users" and "will now
see more attractive people in [their] match results." The
email also reads, "And, no, we didn't just send this email to
everyone on OkCupid. Go ask an ugly friend and see."

OkTrends, the official blog of OkCupid, presents statistical
observations from its user interactions. It was there that Rudder
explained three of the experiments the site used on its unaware
guinea people.

The first experiment, called ‘Love is Blind, or Should Be’,
occurred when the company released its blind date app on January
15, 2013. For seven hours, OkCupid hid all user pictures, then
compared the site metrics to that of a typical Tuesday.

“When the photos were restored at 4PM, 2,200 people were in
the middle of conversations that had started ‘blind’. Those
conversations melted away,” Rudder wrote. “The goodness
was gone, in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the
bright lights at the bar at midnight.”

His conclusion from Love is Blind Day? “[In] short, OkCupid
worked better.”

The second experiment, called ‘So What’s a Picture Worth?’,
looked into how users ranked profiles and pictures together
versus pictures alone. The company believed that text in a
profile didn’t matter, and hid the text from a sample of users’
profiles half the time, and compared the scores of the
picture-only against the same profile that also contained text.

So are people reading what their potential soul mates are
writing? “Essentially, the text is less than 10 [percent] of
what people think of you,” Rudder said. "So, your
picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual
words are worth…almost nothing."

The final test that outlined, called ‘The Power of Suggestion’,
they told possible matches who, in all likelihood, really weren’t
meant to be ‒ those who only had a 30 percent “math
percentage” based on the OkCupid algorithm ‒ that they were
“exceptionally good for each other, displaying a 90 [percent]
match).” The site wanted to find out if the “mere
suggestion” that a potential pairing was a good one caused
people “to actually like each other,” and they then
started a real conversation (which they define as four messages
exchanged between the two people). They also did the same with
those who were a good match, telling them that they were a bad
match.

Rudder said that the ideal situation is when a couple is both
told they are a good match and actually are a good match.
“OkCupid definitely works, but that’s not the whole story.
And if you have to choose only one or the other, the mere myth of
compatibility works just as well as the truth. Thus the career of
someone like Doctor Oz, in a nutshell. And, of course, to some
degree, mine,” he wrote.

Outside social media researcher Rey Junco, who works at the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University,
told ReadWrite.com that he thinks OkCupid’s
testing was more benign than Facebook’s.

"What could have happened with the Facebook manipulation was
that there was a potential for harm," Junco said in the
interview. "The worst thing could have happened [with the
OkCupid testing] is people send a few more messages, and maybe
you went on a date you didn't like."

In its privacy policy, OkCupid does disclose that it may use its
customers’ information for research and analysis.